Bitdefender Home Scanner review

Bitdefender Home Scanner is a free program by security company Bitdefender that scans devices on local networks for security issues.

The need for security has expanded with Internet of Things being a trend, and household devices such as your fridge or thermostat connecting to a local network or the Internet.

It is no longer sufficient to just make sure that your laptop, smartphone or desktop computer is protected. Any device with connectivity, be it a smart TV, game console or household item, can let attackers in if vulnerabilities are found.

The main purpose of Bitdefender Home scanner, besides serving as an advertisement for Bitdefender Box, is to scan connected devices for several vulnerabilities.

Bitdefender Home Scanner

The security program is available free of charge, but it requires that you set up a Bitdefender account or sign in to an existing account to use it.

Bitdefender Home Scanner needs to be installed. You get one option prior to installation, and that is to disable the sending of anonymous reports to the company. There is no option unfortunately to change the installation directory.

The application detects the network the device is connected to when you run it after installation. You get an option to pick another network if that is not the right one. This can be the case for instance if the device is connected to several.

A scan for devices that are connected to the network is run afterwards. Each device found is listed with its name, IP address, the time it was scanned the last time, and status.

Scans take a while to complete, but you can navigate away from the page without impacting the scan of the network and the devices.

There is little however that you can do in the application. The only other option that is worth noting is to click on a device to display detailed information on it.

Device details list more information including the device's MAC address and device type, if detected. The application did detect smartphones, game consoles and routers during scans.

The detection quality was good overall, but it did detect a Microsoft Xbox on one Windows device it was run on even though there was none connected to the network.

The security program scans devices for the following vulnerabilities:

Insecure authentication

Weak login credentials

Hidden backdoors

While it may detect these security issues, it won't detect other issues the devices may have.

Verdict

Bitdefender Home Scanner is a free program that requires registration. It would be excellent if you could use it as a second opinion scanner considering that there is little reason to keep it installed after all of your devices have been scanned. It may make sense in environments that new devices are connected to regularly though. (via Techno360)